Virtual Seminar – Register now
Reposted from Archives & Heritage for Palestine, a series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan
Dr. Rana Barakat
Ongoing Return: How To Re/Consider the Past in the Present
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
9:30 am GMT-7 San Francisco (Ohlone)
12:30 pm EST Toronto (Tkaronto)
7:30 pm GMT+3 Jerusalem/Beirut
Livestream on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram | https://www.facebook.com/MELALibs | https://x.com/MELALibs | @pubforpalestine | @PLSC_AUB
We are honored to host renowned scholar, Dr. Rana Barakat, for the third installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine, a series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan, in defense of Palestinian life, land, liberation, and return. This session will draw upon Dr. Barakat’s extensive work in writing a historiography of Palestine, which situates the Palestinian narrative outside of colonial frameworks in a celebration of indigenous resistance and nationalism. This presentation will continue our Palestinian conversations about return and thinking about return as ongoing through thinking otherwise about the past as well as the future. How is ongoing return a way of being with the past in the present as we imagine our futures? How does ongoing return affect how we engage our material pasts? Be it through how we think about archiving or archives, collecting and museum collections, history and historiography, much can be learned from Palestine and Palestinian practices. If we center return as an ongoing practice, we can ask, how do we return to/with Palestine and how is ongoing return a methodology for thinking about the past in the present while we imagine our futures? This conversation will discuss the preservation of Palestinian history – from popular memory, storytelling, and oral history – as part of the movement for liberation.
The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association (Archives & Heritage for Palestine Advocacy Sub-Group), the American University of Beirut’s Palestine Land Studies Center, Publishers for Palestine, and the Archives & Digital Media Lab; and sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, We Here and up//root. The series responds to the urgent need to act in solidarity with Palestinian colleagues and institutions in Palestine and the Shetat (Diaspora) to safeguard the heritage, history, and memory of the Palestinian people under settler colonialism and genocide. Through education and advocacy, we work to surface, connect, amplify, and promote ongoing efforts by Palestinians and supporters in the archives and heritage sectors.
About the Speakers & Hosts:
Rana Barakat is associate professor of history and contemporary Arab studies and Director of the Museum at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has published in notable venues including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her forthcoming book, Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba (UNC Press), advances an indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine by focusing on the details of the people and place of Lifta village over time. She is currently working on her next book, “The Buraq Revolt: Constructing a History of Resistance in Palestine,” which argues that this 1929 revolt was the first sign in the Mandate period of sustained mass resistance to the settler-colonial project, including direct and rhetorical actions against both political Zionism and British imperialism, planting seeds of mass political mobilization.
Dr. Jamila Ghaddar is a Lebanese writer, archivist, historian and educator. She is assistant professor at Dalhousie University’s Department of Information Science in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (homeland of the Mi’kmaq) also known as Halifax, Canada. She is founding director of the Archives & Digital Media Lab and a Research Affiliate at AUB’s Palestine Land Studies Center. She recently completed a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship with Raymond Frogner (National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation) and Dr. Greg Bak (History Dept.) at the University of Manitoba. Ghaddar has worked in archives and around the world, including at the American University of Beirut’s Jafet Library where she worked on the personal papers of Dr. Constantine Zurayk who coined the term ‘Nakba’; and at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory in Johannesburg where she helped preserve the papers of anti-apartheid hero, Nelson Mandela.
Tam Rayan Tam Rayan is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, specializing in Archives and Digital Curation. They received their MI in Information Studies and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Their research is focused on deconstructing how colonialism operates through archival infrastructures as well as how to build transformative archival representations of those in diaspora. Specifically, they are interested in how to better serve and represent the recordkeeping needs of Palestinians with unique intergenerational traumas, impacted by forced migration, displacement, and exile. They are an Anti-Racist Digital Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, a former steering committee member of the SAA Archivists and Archives of Color section, and a former ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow. Their research has been published in Across the Disciplines and Archival Science. Register now
Contact us at:
Shereen Malherbe 